Noma Copenhagen: World’s best restaurant: Closes its current location!

March 2017 Update:
It is learnt that Noma DK has closed permanently at its current location. The founder Rene Redzepi plans to relaunch Noma is a new location, with new farm theme, pure veg more in summer and sea food specialty centre in winter. Full details on this NY Times article.
I was fortunate enough to walk around this building on Feb 24, 2017, 4 days before it shut shop. Above two pics are the recent ones I clicked of Noma DK in its current location. Now it is accessible by the new Inner harbor Bridge as well. Not sure if the owners thought the easy access to public is a compromise to the exclusivity of the restaurant.

Original Post.
Learnt about an interesting fact during our canal tour of
Copenhagen.

What you see in this photo is Noma Restaurant in Copenhagen.
This restaurant has been consistently winning the award as world’s #1
restaurant.

However, this year they’ve slipped to 2nd place, loosing
first place to a hotel in Spain. (reportedly Noma had an accident of serving a
poisonous food early this year, which resulted in hospitalization of several guests and caused lots of negative publicity)

As the hotelbecame
popular, it turned out to be a tourist destination than an eating joint. Lots
of people started visiting the restaurant just out of curiosity- to see what it
looks like and what they serve, without any real intention of buying food
there. Tourist buses sometimes would unload a bus full of tourists in front of
the hotel. The restaurant wasn’t prepared to handle this kind of crowd and too
many visitors would disturb their customers. Hence restaurant management had to
think of a solution. Instead of building fence or compound around the hotel and
employing security guards for crowd control, hotel management came up with an
innovative idea.

They set up small garden and introduced honey bees. Bees
would be flying around the garden and the fear of getting bitten by bees would
keep people from coming closer to hotel. Regular customers would be escorted
through a bee free path. Restaurant will also get free supply of honey from the
bees.

Well, above is what our tour guide told us. I have a feeling
that he was exaggerating a bit for dramatic effect. I did an attempt to find
out if this is true. In the below link, I found out that restaurant is indeed
building a garden with bees. But there’s no proof that motive of having the bee
is to wade off crowd. It says restaurant owner is fond of bees. [Details here ], so I leave the interpretation to you.

The term Noma is reportedly derived from Nordic & Mad. The hotel was once a warehouse and serves different kinds of food, which I am not able to make sense of. So I won't go into details of that and stop this post here.